In this release we are introducing a new feature for capturing while driving. We’ve noticed that while the user is doing captures in the car, because of unfavorable conditions(strong sunlight, rain, windshield wipers, dirty windshield…) the camera autofocuses on the windshield and because of that the captures get blurry. To prevent this blur, we’ll be turning off the autofocus and enabling infinity focus when we detect that user is moving above 15 km/h (10 mph).
Changes
Infinity focus while driving to prevent blurred images
Added deletion option for single images that are uploaded
UI improvements
Bug/Crash fixes
If you have any questions, or suggestions - please report them here.
The inifnity focus is a tricky thing. I was actually looking forwars to getting this option, because of the problems with dirt on windscreen. But now I see that my Xiaomi 12 has a very blurry implementation of “infinity focus”. You can see here: The first pic is auto focus, all following pics in the sequence are blurry:
I have two Samsung phones here, both have a good infinity focus. So I know its not mapillary's fault, but maybe this option should not be on as default. I can check with OpenCamera app, it's the same behavior at option "infinity focus". Some Huawei phones I owned some years ago had the same unusable infinity focus. So... its tricky. I got the app update 2 days ago not knowing about the new feature, and unfortunately all of my 8.000 pics yesterday are blurry now
Thank you for letting us know @Teddy73 - that’s unfortunate about your images from yesterday .
We are going to investigate whether we can detect this programmatically, and if not will likely set this feature to default off. Thank you again for your feedback and for making Mapillary better for everyone!
Hi @Teddy73 , we just released a new version to open testing 6.4.80. Unfortunately we couldn’t reproduce your issue. We added some additional checks to evaluate if the phone has proper infinity focus support or not. And we further more tweaked the Infinity focus for better experience.
Could you please check if it works on your Xiaomi phone?
To check you just need to open the camera, close it and then go to settings.
In the settings look if you have the toggle option for Infinity displayed or not, if it’s not there then the camera of that phone doesn’t have proper infinity focus support.
It will help us a lot if you check it.
Since this update I am experiencing some issues with the app. Suddenly the app is running very slow whenever I go in and out of image sequences that haven’t been uploaded. Deleting a photo may also take at least 1 minute. I usually review the images to delete any that are not useful, which used to take a couple of seconds, but now this time it can easily take 6 minutes.
There are many times when it says that a sequence is uploading but the information bar does not appear. Other times they stay in a queue without anything happening, or it says that they are waiting for Wi-Fi when I have the option to upload images with data activated.
I have to say that the infinity focus option has worked perfectly. I have a Samsung Galaxy A54
Thank you @Albergarri788 for reporting it.
I’ll look into it. Could you just confirm are you talking about version 6.4.68 or 6.4.80 ?
And could you tell me if you are using an SD card?
Hi, I got the 6.4.80 now. I just checked: On Xiaomi 12 phone, opened the app, then opened the camera, then went back to settings. The option for infinity mode is still there.
I can do a sequence tomorrow to see if the tweaked infinity focus works better now.
Hi @Albergarri788 thanks for reporting this. We did some optimizations and the latest version 6.4.84 should run smoother. We’ll be still looking to improving the performance even further with future releases.
I’ve been using this latest version and it has reduced loading times a lot. It’s still annoying to use but it’s a very good start. Thank you for reading and taking this into account.
